At one end, on the turquoise-and-white face of the 1902 Zoological Museum on Bolshaya Nikitskaya, the plasterwork seems to have evolved into a rampage of shape and line. Stone monkeys, rams’ heads, owls and hares writhe free of a cornucopia of looping and twisting lower life forms: reptiles, insects and plants. The interior of the building is a labyrinth of laboratories, offices, a library, auditoria, and long back corridors lined with rooms of study for many professors. When he was living in the Herzen House of Writers on nearby Tverskoi Boulevard, Mandelstam liked to visit the museum. He was grateful to the great biologists Linnaeus, Buffon and Pallas for awakening his ‘childish astonishment at science’. He loved the museum’s dark-painted galleried halls crowded with stuffed animals staring from behind vitrines – night predators with glass eyes, Bubulcus ibis, Delphinus delphis – and cabinets stacked with bottled creatures from the sea. ‘Lying around unsupervised in the dark vestibule of the zoological museum on Nikitsky Street is the jawbone of a whale, like a huge plough’, Mandelstam wrote in Journey to Armenia, an exuberant piece of travel prose that thrills to the drama of evolution. The museum’s curator Boris Kuzin (‘anything but a bookworm, he studied science on the run’) was a friend and inspiration to Mandelstam, and the poet would sit drinking Georgian wine in his vast office in the depths of the museum. Sometimes Mandelstam would rise and pace round the room, composing poems that came suddenly, like ‘Cherry Brandy’, datelined ‘March 1931, Moscow, Zoolog. Museum’, which Nadezhda wrote down right there in the museum as he spoke it: ‘I will tell it to you straight … everything is just brandy, cherry brandy, my angel’.
In a symmetry unusual for a contemporary Moscow street, low curving buildings stand on opposite corners at either end of Romanov: the University History Faculty building on Bolshaya Nikitskaya, and the Sheremetev Corner House on Vozdvizhenka, once the home of the serf opera singer Praskovia Kovalyova, ‘the Pearl’, secret wife of Count Nikolai Sheremetev, scion of one of Russia’s greatest aristocratic dynasties. At the northern end, where Romanov meets Vozdvizhenka, the Schusev Museum of Architecture, once the ‘State Chamber’, seals the street with restrained classical grace.
Where to the Hellene shone
Beauty,
To me, from the black holes gaped
Shame
Mandelstam writes in ‘Cherry Brandy’. The city’s finances were once administered from the State Chamber. When Vozdvizhenka became a street of government buildings in the first years after the Revolution, this three-storeyed palace was turned over for use as headquarters of the Central Committee. Every day, Stalin and Molotov would walk the few hundred yards to their offices in No. 5 Vozdvizhenka from their apartments in the Kremlin – without bodyguards, as Molotov remembered with nostalgia. In 1923 the Central Committee offices moved to Staraya Ploshchad’, Old Square, on the other side of the Kremlin, closer to the Lubyanka. It was only at the end of 1930 that the Politburo, acting on a report from the secret police, resolved that ‘Comrade Stalin be immediately required to cease travelling around the city by foot’.
This spread of land on the crest of the hill above the now-buried Neglinnaya River lay within the ‘White City’, an extensive region on the north side of the Kremlin, enclosed for two centuries by fortified walls of white stone and brick, built in the late sixteenth century, whose curving line is still traced by Moscow’s ring of boulevards. The land on which Romanov Lane stands was once known as Romanov Court, and belonged to the seventeenth-century Moscow boyar Nikita Romanov, who had been given it by his cousin the Tsar. Over the centuries, the loosely arranged estates, stone palaces, courts and monasteries were rectified into streets. Before the revolutionary remaking of Russian culture, street names were anecdotal and popular. In former centuries this land was known variously as the ‘Romanov Palaces’, ‘Nikitsky’ (after the well-liked boyar), and also by the names of other landowners, Razumovsky and Khitrovo, whose demesnes were on this ground before Count Nikolai Sheremetev bought it, as an act of generosity, from his cash-strapped brother-in-law Count Alexei Razumovsky. After that, the street became Sheremetev Lane.
Perpendicular to it are Bolshaya Nikitskaya Street (known in ancient Moscow as Novgorod Street) and Vozdvizhenka, one of Moscow’s oldest roads, which radiate out from the gates of the Kremlin in the direction of the ancient city of Novgorod three hundred miles to the north-west. In 1471, Tsar Ivan III was greeted ceremonially on Vozdvizhenka, on the Trinity Bridge, just beyond the Kremlin’s Trinity Gates, which once crossed the wide Neglinnaya, on his return from a military campaign to subdue the republic of Novgorod. The names Vozdvizhenka and Bolshaya Nikitskaya were taken from local monasteries – the Krestodvizhensky Monastery (Monastery of the Elevation of the Cross) and the Nikitsky Convent – founded in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when Moscow had risen to power as the centre of the unified Russian state. The Elevation of the Cross is a Byzantine feast traditionally associated with the glory of Orthodox Christian empire, which commemorates the recovery from the Persians by Heraclius of the ‘true cross’, unearthed in Jerusalem by Emperor Constantine’s mother Helena while her son was building the Cathedral of Hagia Sophia. On the mid-September feast day of the Elevation, which is once again celebrated in the surviving churches of the neighbourhood, ‘Lord have mercy’ is sung again and again, as the Cross is raised high. In 1934, the Church of the Elevation (all that remained of the monastery after the great fire that greeted Napoleon’s army in 1812) was demolished during Stalin’s massive reconstruction of Moscow; its parish priest, Father Alexander Sidorov, had been murdered in a labour camp three years earlier. The Nikitsky Monastery had been demolished the previous year. Before its demolition, the Bolsheviks who lived on this street could see the nuns from the back rooms of their apartments, heads bowed over their quilting. In 1935, an electricity station for the new metro system was erected in the place of the convent, a windowless temple of power in heavily massed dark grey stone, with friezes of hero workers, their giant muscled bodies hewing, welding, drilling.
On Romanov, images of Moscow’s past and present and dreams of its future arrange themselves for contemplation. On one side of the street at the Bolshaya Nikitskaya end is the two-storey rear wing of a small classical palace, once the possession of a succession of Russia’s noblest families – Golitsyns, Orlovs and Meshcherskys – and now the premises of Moscow University Press. The rebel poet Vilgelm Kyukhelbeker worked in the palace as a private tutor in the years immediately preceding the Decembrist uprising against tsarist autocracy in 1825, in which he played a crucial part. An opulent, rarely patronised ‘Antiques Salon’ now occupies the corner of the palace on the Romanov side, its windows displaying gilded porcelain urns, a stuffed Siberian tiger, model ships, eighteenth-century landscapes. Bright Perspex signs are pinned like wings on the walls of the palace, advertising new restaurants called Tesoro and Papillon, and the Avant-garde Floristry Boutique. As the windows run along what was once a low side-wing of the palace, the building slips free of the commercial logic that drives the changes on Romanov and sinks back into the cosy shabbiness of a more stagnant era. The windows of the communal apartments are dusty, some of their panes cracked, the attic spaces derelict. Large areas of pale yellow paint and plaster have come away from the outer walls. In one room, icons are clustered on a shelf, a man works under a bare lightbulb, sickly-looking spider plants and jars of marinated cucumbers stand in the space between the double window panes, rags and dirty cloths are tumbled halfway up the glass.